The photographer Joseph Szabo’s pictures in the new book “American Teen” look timeless in certain ways—the crisp black-and-white of the images, the stately framing, the instantly recognizable, casual but charged, proximity of teen-agers hanging out, arms slung over their friends’ shoulders, heads tipped together, close enough to smell one another’s shampoo. Here they are, crammed together in the random corners they stake out on a big high-school campus, or thigh to thigh on a patchwork of beach towels, or whispering in one another’s ears, thick as thieves, magnetized by one another as by nobody and nothing else.

But there is also a sense in which these images belong, ineluctably, to the time in which most of them were made, the nineteen-seventies and nineteen-eighties, after Szabo had begun teaching photography and photographing students at Malverne High School, on Long Island. It’s not just the styles his subjects favor—abundant, feathered hair, high-waisted, slouchy jeans, ringer T-shirts, platform shoes, puka-shell necklaces. (In any case, some of their looks would read as hip today.) It’s not even the fact that the photos frequently show kids smoking cigarettes (though that’s certainly striking to see). The adolescent subjects of Szabo’s photos project something else: nearly all, even the ones who look shy or awkward or sidelined by their peers, have a kind of spontaneous presence, the loose-limbed, insouciant grace, even swagger, of subjects who have not been making and curating images of themselves and one another for as long as they can remember. As the musician and artist Kim Gordon writes in a short introduction to “American Teen,” Szabo “captures not just what it looks like to be that confusing age, but what it felt like in a pre-filter-polished world before Instagram, AI, and TikTok, all these contemporary mirrors that define you through algorithms with every glance.”

Szabo was in his early thirties, and had recently earned an M.F.A. in photography at the Pratt Institute, when he moved to Long Island. In 1973 he started teaching darkroom-photography classes at Malverne High. He found that showing kids how to make their own prints, the inextinguishable magic of watching pictures emerge from a chemical developer, was a way to spark interest and connect with students who often seemed more disaffected from school than he remembered ever having been himself. “They’d be, like, I’m staying in this class; I’ve got to be able to do this thing with a camera,” Szabo, who is now eighty-two, told me recently. The students were natural subjects for him, too—always there, curious to see their lives reflected back to them, with the understated grandeur of black-and-white film. Szabo started taking pictures for the school yearbook and carrying a camera around the school with him all the time. “The kids would say, ‘That’s Szabo, don’t worry about him. He’s all right. He’s not going to take you to the principal’s office for smoking outside—or inside—the school.’ ” Eventually, he started turning up at other locations: the deli where some Malverne students gathered, Jones Beach, a Rolling Stones concert in Philadelphia, a bar in town co-owned by the actor and former boxer Tony Danza, even—with parents’ permission—some of the students’ houses as they prepped for nights out.

“American Teen” is published by Important Flowers, an imprint of the art-book publisher Mack, founded by the director and screenwriter Sofia Coppola, another dedicated observer of adolescent self-presentation. Coppola told me that she first saw a photograph of Szabo’s on the cover of the 1991 album “Green Mind,” by the proto-grunge band Dinosaur Jr. It shows a young girl—maybe twelve years old—standing on the beach, with long dark hair, gimlet eyes, and a partially smoked cigarette in her mouth. She looks both vulnerable and curiously self-possessed. Her name was Priscilla, and Szabo never saw her again. Coppola, who collects photography, told me that she was instantly taken with the image. Years later, when she launched Important Flowers, she thought of Szabo’s work immediately, especially after she noticed that some earlier books of his were now out of print and selling for five hundred dollars or more online.

Coppola told me that she admires how Szabo’s images can feel intimate without seeming intrusive. His subjects “feel comfortable with him, you can tell,” she said. “The photos don’t seem self-conscious or posed. The kids don’t have their guards up. You don’t feel he’s peering at them.” He made several pictures of couples making out or gazing besottedly into each other’s eyes, surrounded by other teen-agers who show a funny kind of delicacy—they haven’t moved out of the couples’ force field, but they’re not gawping at them, either. In “American Teen,” there’s a picture that shows three girls seated at their desks. The one in the middle is blowing a bubble, with her legs stretched out and propped up on the chair of the girl in front of her. She is looking down at the papers on her desk, and she seems like she’s concentrating—not deeply engaged but not bored, either, at ease in the classroom like it was a satellite of home, and seemingly at ease in her own skin, too.

I went to high school in the late nineteen-seventies myself, and “American Teen” made me nostalgic for how hanging out felt then, powered by the implicit guarantee that between classes or after school you would find your friends posted in their usual spots, and they would have time for you, so much time. It reminded me, pleasantly, too, of a kind of low-key, free-to-be-you-and-me androgyny that I associate with that era. In Szabo’s pictures, the guys and girls alike wear jeans a lot; many of the boys have shoulder-length hair; the clothes are often loose and layered (big sweaters, denim jackets, overalls, plaid shirts over tank tops), and nobody looks hellbent on perfection. That scruffier, cozier version of androgyny coexisted in the culture with the more flamboyant gender-bending of glam rock. The seventies were fun that way. Flipping through the book, I thought of the Replacements song “Androgynous,” from 1984, with the hopeful lyrics “Now, something meets boy, and something meets girl / They both look the same, they’re overjoyed in this world / Same hair revolution, unisex evolution / Tomorrow, who’s gonna fuss?”

As it happens, the fussing—about gender identity, about teen-agers and their anxieties—has only got louder in recent decades. Szabo’s photos, by contrast, are remarkably free of fretting or judgment. They are a reminder of how cool teen-agers can be, in their own tribes, on their own time. ♦